Fox New’s Judge Andrew Napolitano warned Monday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s firing on Friday of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe could be seen as “obstruction of justice.”
Napolitano said on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” Monday that he viewed McCabe’s firing as “vindictive” and “reckless.”
“Andrew McCabe is more likely than not to be a witness against the attorney general’s boss, the president of the United States,” Napolitano said. “I think that firing him in that environment could very well be determined to diminish his effectiveness as a witness. What’s that called? Obstruction of justice.”
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“I don’t know if Bob Mueller wants to go there, but that’s the argument,” he added, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Sessions fired McCabe on Friday night, saying that the former FBI official had made an unauthorized disclosure to the media and wasn’t fully forthcoming with investigators.
McCabe said he was fired as part of an effort to undermine Mueller’s probe into Russia’s election interference, in which he is likely to be a witness.
McCabe led the FBI in the weeks after President Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey, a reported area of interest in Mueller’s probe.
Napolitano also blasted Trump’s lawyer John Dowd for saying in a statement that he wanted Mueller’s probe to be shut down.
“Going on television, saying, ‘I pray that you shut down shop,’ is not the way a lawyer for an innocent defendant conveys the message on TV,” Napolitano said.
Dowd initially told The Daily Beast that he was making the statement on Mueller’s probe on behalf of the president, but later walked back the remark.
Trump once described Napolitano as a “very talented legal mind.”